unRAID Project Update, Core Features, Virtualization, and Thanks You's


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We are talking to the guys working on this at the closest level.  Alex Williamson is THE MAN on this stuff (VFIO in particular) and his word trumps what any one else on a forum here has to say about it.

 

Since he is the man as you admit and he works on the stuff for Red Hat, wouldn't it be wise to take a serious look at using a Red Hat based OS for exactly this purpose? Perhaps for unraid 7.0 series?

 

Most definitely!  We are open to the idea of another distro (never said we weren't).  Bottom line is that would be a bigger change to make than we can at this point for unRAID 6.  I am not promising anything for unRAID 7, but if there was a time to reassess the underlying operating system, unRAID 7 would be a good time to do that I think.  No promises being made here, but want folks to know that we aren't opposed to changing how we do things.  All to be reviewed in due time.

 

Woohoooooo!

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What some folks CAN do with their own equipment and for their own purposes is very different than what a company can and should do to support a wider audience of users with various usage requirements.  The fact of the matter is that when I look at the stuff you posted of all your screenshots, I see a bunch of daisy-chaining of various management toolsets that others built to create some type of mastermind NAS.  What I don't see is any clear single management interface, any use-case scenario demonstrations, or simple use instructions for the everyday user.  I see a lot of capability, but no defined direction.

 

Our mission is to service the majority of our customer base in the best way we can.  I don't think adding all that complexity would accomplish anything for the majority of users except to add confusion to something that doesn't need to be that complicated.

 

I had to stop reading this thread at page three/post 42 (quoted above).

 

Unraid is a NAS for me. My build is low powered hardware (circa 4 years ago, celeron-based M/B, a $20 video card) in a big case with lots of disk and a few SAS controllers. Under the heaviest NAS loads, it barely uses 5% of the CPU. It idles at about 60 watts when the disks spin down. I can't/don't need/want/won't run multiple VMs using video cards with GPUs -- this is a storage server after all, not a showplace for uber-videocard game play.

 

Yet you claim that grumpy's list of NAS features is complicated and confusing. Compared to deciphering the feature set in your original post? And what it will take to use them? Ha.

 

I'll tell you, if I have to spend more than a few minutes on figuring out how to disable/ignore/not install the VM-related features in unRaid v6 that you and Eric (2/3 of the development team) are building, and have to deal with any bugs and performance hits for VM support, I'll stick with version 5 until there's a good reason to move to another product.

 

Maybe there's a business model for you guys going in this direction, but it excludes this customer. I sure hope you've done your market research.

 

- Eric

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I'll tell you, if I have to spend more than a few minutes on figuring out how to disable/ignore/not install the VM-related features in unRaid v6 that you and Eric (2/3 of the development team) are building, and have to deal with any bugs and performance hits for VM support, I'll stick with version 5 until there's a good reason to move to another product.

You will probably just have to select the default boot option (i.e. do nothing) as it has already been stated that v6 will have an option to load without KVM/Xen support.  I expect this is how most new users will start, and many may never go beyond this.

 

However I think there are a significant proportion of the user base who want to be able to do more than this.  For these the virtualisation features become an important feature.

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